Book Show: Writers on Writing

Australia's public broadcaster, Radio National, had Kate Grenville and other writers on The Book Show yesterday. The other writers were Mark Tredinnick and screen writer Geoffrey Atherden (Mother and Son, Step Father of the Bride, The Aunty Jack Show). This episode, "Writers on Writing" is available online as audio-on-demand. The show also broadcastes by Pod-caste and RSS.

I really found it interesting to be reading Grenville's Searching for the Secret River and also hear her discuss it. There's also something very heartening about hearing the authors talk, as opposed even to reading their ideas about writing. Somehow their talking, hearing them take in that breath, hesitate, then speak directly -- somehow that makes them fell more real.

Best part of the day

Check out Tom Cho on Radio National, 10 Dec 2006 live, later by audio on demand.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/nightair/stories/2006/1768453.htm

To coincide with the anniversary of the Cronulla riots, producer Nadya Stani has constructed an intricate mix of participant and observer accounts of the events.

Her feature for The Night Air explores the contemporary meanings of race, racism and conflict in suburban Australia. Melbourne writer Tom Cho takes a playful view of the expected roles for people of non-English-speaking background and members of the cast of the performance piece Grounded offer personal, dramatised versions of the migrant experience.

Thanks, Liz, for your encouragement and pointing me to Olga Masters:

Many people have said to me
'What a pity you had such a big family to raise.
Think of the novels and the short stories and the poems
you never had time to write because of that.'
And I looked at my children and I said,
'These are my poems. These are my
short stories.'

Writing and baby

I'm expecting my first child. And I wondered what it meant for writing. There are plenty of views out there that have frightened me. Helen Garner, who just won the Melbourne Prize, which is like the Melbourne version of the Nobel Prize for literature, has said she thinks she had only one child because she wasn't sure how two or more would encrouch on her writing. Carmel Bird, another Melbourne writer, has said something more extreme -- something along the lines that you can't have a family or children or other creative pursuits if you want to really write. (Having now committed this to paper, maybe their views have changed in the meantime, so I'll just take it all with a grain of salt. Both very interesting writers and worth checking out.)

I don't know, because I don't have a child yet. But all I can imagine is that different approaches work for different people.

On the other hand, there are more optomistic stories! Let me share with you the passage in Kate Grenville's "Searching for the Secret River" that made me dog-ear the page and stride over the the cash register: [p.145]

In the years after Lillian's Story was published, our children Tom and Alice were born, and I added another mantra: Don't wait for time to write. I learned to work in whatever slivers of time the day might give me--one of my favorite scenes in Joan Makes History was written in the car waiting to pick up Tom from a birthday party, on the only paper I could find, the inside of a flattened Panadol packet. I had slivers of time, so I wrote in slivers of words: a page here, a paragraph there. Eventually the slivers would add up to something.
I wrote four more novels using that makeshift method.